Omega overview
If you just want a very quick overview, you might prefer to read the quick-start guide.
Omega operates on a set of databases. Each database is created and updated separately using either omindex or scriptindex. You can search these databases (or any other Xapian database with suitable contents) via a web front-end provided by omega, a CGI application. A search can also be done over more than one database at once.
There are separate documents covering CGI parameters, the Term Prefixes which are conventionally used, and OmegaScript, the language used to define omega's web interface. Omega ships with several OmegaScript templates and you can use these, modify them, or just write your own. See the "Supplied Templates" section below for details of the supplied templates.
Omega parses queries using the Xapian::QueryParser class - for the supported syntax, see queryparser.html in the xapian-core documentation - available online at: http://xapian.org/docs/queryparser.html
Term construction
Documents within an omega database are stored with two types of terms: those used for probabilistic searching (the CGI parameter 'P'), and those used for boolean filtering (the CGI parameter 'B'). Boolean terms start with an initial capital letter denoting the 'group' of the term (e.g. 'M' for MIME type), while probabilistic terms are all lower-case, and are also stemmed before adding to the database.
The "english" stemmer is used by default - you can configure this for omindex and scriptindex with --stemmer=LANGUAGE (use --stemmer=none to disable stemming, see omindex --help for the list of accepted language names). At search time you can configure the stemmer by adding $set{stemmer,LANGUAGE} to the top of your OmegaScript template.
The two term types are used as follows when building the query: B(oolean) terms with the same prefix are ORed together, with all the different prefix groups being ANDed together. This is then FILTERed against the P(robabilistic) terms. This will look something like:
[ FILTER ] / \ / \ P-terms [ AND ] / | ... \ / [ OR ] / | ... \ B(F,1) B(F,2)...B(F,n)Where B(F,1) is the first boolean term with prefix F, and so on.
The intent here is to allow filtering on arbitrary (and, typically, orthogonal) characteristics of the document. For instance, by adding boolean terms "Ttext/html", "Ttext/plain" and "P/press" you would be filtering the probabilistic search for only documents that are both in the "/press" site and which are either of MIME type text/html or text/plain. (See below for more information about sites.)
If there is no probabilistic query, the boolean filter is promoted to be the query, and the weighting scheme is set to boolean. This has the effect of applying the boolean filter to the whole database.
In order to add more boolean prefixes, you will need to alter the index_file() function in omindex.cc. Currently omindex adds several useful ones, detailed below.
Probabilistic terms are constructed from the title, body and keywords of a document. (Not all document types support all three areas of text.) Title terms are stored with position data starting at 0, body terms starting 100 beyond title terms, and keyword terms starting 100 beyond body terms. This allows queries using positional data without causing false matches across the different types of term.
Sites
Within a database, Omega supports multiple sites. These are recorded using boolean terms (see 'Term construction', above) to allow filtering on them.
Sites work by having all documents within them having a common base URL. For instance, you might have two sites, one for your press area and one for your product descriptions:
You could index all documents within http://example.com/press/ using a site of '/press', and all within http://example.com/products/ using '/products'.
Sites are also useful because omindex indexes documents through the file system, not by fetching from the web server. If you don't have a URL to file system mapping which puts all documents under one hierarchy, you'll need to index each separate section as a site.
An obvious example of this is the way that many web servers map URLs of the form <http://example.com/~<username>/> to a directory within that user's home directory (such as ~<username>/pub on a Unix system). In this case, you can index each user's home page separately, as a site of the form '/~<username>'. You can then use boolean filters to allow people to search only a specific home page (or a group of them), or omit such terms to search everyone's pages.
Note that the site specified when you index is used to build the complete URL that the results page links to. Thus while sites will typically want to be relative to the hostname part of the URL (e.g. '/site' rather than 'http://example.com/site'), you can use them to have a single search across several different hostnames. This will still work if you actually store each distinct hostname in a different database.
omindex operation
omindex is fairly simple to use, for example:
omindex --db default --url http://example.com/ /var/www/example.comFor a full list of command line options supported, see man omindex or omindex --help.
You must specify the database to index into (it's created if it doesn't exist, but parent directories must exist). You will often also want to specify the base URL (which is used as the site, and can be relative to the hostname - starts '/' - or absolute - starts with a scheme, e.g. 'http://example.com/products/'). If not specified, the base URL defaults to /.
You also need to tell omindex which directory to index. This should be either a single directory (in which case it is taken to be the directory base of the entire site being indexed), or as two arguments, the first being the directory base of the site being indexed, and the second being a relative directory within that to index.
For instance, in the example above, if you separate your products by size, you might end up with:
If the entire website is stored in the file system under the directory /www/example, then you would probably index the site in two passes, one for the '/press' site and one for the '/products' site. You might use the following commands:
$ omindex -p --db /var/lib/omega/data/default --url /press /www/example/press $ omindex -p --db /var/lib/omega/data/default --url /products /www/example/productsIf you add a new large products, but don't want to reindex the whole of the products section, you could do:
$ omindex -p --db /var/lib/omega/data/default --url /products /www/example/products largeand just the large products will be reindexed. You need to do it like that, and not as:
$ omindex -p --db /var/lib/omega/data/default --url /products/large /www/example/products/largebecause that would make the large products part of a new site, '/products/large', which is unlikely to be what you want, as large products would no longer come up in a search of the products site. (Note that the --depth-limit option may come in handy if you have sites '/products' and '/products/large', or similar.)
omindex has built-in support for indexing HTML, PHP, text files, CSV (Comma-Separated Values) files, and AbiWord documents. It can also index a number of other formats using external programs. Filter programs are run with CPU and memory limits to prevent a runaway filter from blocking indexing of other files.
The following formats are supported as standard (you can tell omindex to use other filters too - see below):
- HTML (.html, .htm, .shtml)
- PHP (.php) - our HTML parser knows to ignore PHP code
- text files (.txt, .text)
- SVG (.svg)
- CSV (Comma-Separated Values) files (.csv)
- PDF (.pdf) if pdftotext is available (comes with xpdf)
- PostScript (.ps, .eps, .ai) if ps2pdf (from ghostscript) and pdftotext (comes with xpdf) are available
- OpenOffice/StarOffice documents (.sxc, .stc, .sxd, .std, .sxi, .sti, .sxm, .sxw, .sxg, .stw) if unzip is available
- OpenDocument format documents (.odt, .ods, .odp, .odg, .odc, .odf, .odb, .odi, .odm, .ott, .ots, .otp, .otg, .otc, .otf, .oti, .oth) if unzip is available
- MS Word documents (.doc, .dot) if antiword is available
- MS Excel documents (.xls, .xlb, .xlt, .xlr) if xls2csv is available (comes with catdoc)
- MS Powerpoint documents (.ppt, .pps) if catppt is available (comes with catdoc)
- MS Office 2007 documents (.docx, .docm, .dotx, .dotm, .xlsx, .xlsm, .xltx, .xltm, .pptx, .pptm, .potx, .potm, .ppsx, .ppsm) if unzip is available
- Wordperfect documents (.wpd) if wpd2text is available (comes with libwpd)
- MS Works documents (.wps, .wpt) if wps2text is available (comes with libwps)
- MS Outlook message (.msg) if perl with Email::Outlook::Message and HTML::Parser modules is available
- AbiWord documents (.abw)
- Compressed AbiWord documents (.zabw) if gzip is available
- Rich Text Format documents (.rtf) if unrtf is available
- Perl POD documentation (.pl, .pm, .pod) if pod2text is available
- TeX DVI files (.dvi) if catdvi is available
- DjVu files (.djv, .djvu) if djvutxt is available
- XPS files (.xps) if unzip is available
- Debian packages (.deb, .udeb) if dpkg-deb is available
- RPM packages (.rpm) if rpm is available
If you have additional extensions that represent one of these types, you can add an additional MIME mapping using the --mime-type option. For instance:
$ omindex --db /var/lib/omega/data/default --url /press /www/example/press --mime-type doc:application/postscriptThe syntax of --mime-type is 'ext:type', where ext is the extension of a file of that type (everything after the last '.'), and type is one of:
- text/csv
- text/html
- text/plain
- text/rtf
- text/x-perl
- application/msword
- application/pdf
- application/postscript
- application/vnd.ms-excel
- application/vnd.ms-outlook
- application/vnd.ms-powerpoint
- application/vnd.ms-works
- application/vnd.ms-xpsdocument
- application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text
- application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet
- application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.presentation
- application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.graphics
- application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.chart
- application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.formula
- application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.database
- application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.image
- application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text-master
- application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text-template
- application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet-template
- application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.presentation-template
- application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.graphics-template
- application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.chart-template
- application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.formula-template
- application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.image-template
- application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text-web
- application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
- application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.template
- application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet
- application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.template
- application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation
- application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slideshow
- application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.template
- application/vnd.sun.xml.calc
- application/vnd.sun.xml.calc.template
- application/vnd.sun.xml.draw
- application/vnd.sun.xml.draw.template
- application/vnd.sun.xml.impress
- application/vnd.sun.xml.impress.template
- application/vnd.sun.xml.math
- application/vnd.sun.xml.writer
- application/vnd.sun.xml.writer.global
- application/vnd.sun.xml.writer.template
- application/vnd.wordperfect
- application/x-abiword
- application/x-abiword-compressed
- application/x-debian-package
- application/x-dvi
- application/x-redhat-package-manager
- image/svg+xml
- image/vnd.djvu
- ignore (magic token to tell omindex to quietly ignore such files)
By default, files with the following extensions are marked as 'ignore':
- a - css - dll - dylib - exe - js - lib - o - obj - soIf you wish to remove a MIME mapping, you can do this by omitting the type - for example to not index .doc files, use: --mime-type=doc:
The lookup of extensions in the MIME mappings is case sensitive, but if an extension isn't found and includes upper case ASCII letters, they're converted to lower case and the lookup is repeated, so you effectively get case insensitive lookup for mappings specified with a lower-case extension, but you can set different handling for differently cased variants if you need to.
You can add support for additional MIME content types (or override existing ones) using the --filter option - for example, if you wanted to handle files of MIME type application/octet-stream by running them through strings -n8, you can pass the option --filter=application/octet-stream:'strings -n8'. The filename of the file to be extracted will be appended to this command, separated by a space. Commands run via --filter need to produce UTF-8 text output on stdout.
A more complex example of the use of --filter makes use of OpenOffice, via the unoconv script, to extract text from various formats. First you need to start a listening instance (if you don't, unoconv will start up OpenOffice for every file, which is rather inefficient) - the & just tell the shell to run it in the background:
unoconv --listener &Then run omindex with options such as --filter=application/msword:'unoconv --stdout -f text' (you'll want one for each format which you want to extract text from with OpenOffice).
If you know of a reliable filter which can extract text from a file format which might be of interest to others, please let us know so we can consider including it as a standard filter.
The --duplicates option controls how omindex handles documents which map to a URL which is already in the database. The default (which can be explicitly set with --duplicates=replace) is to reindex if the last modified time of the file is newer than that recorded in the database. The alternative is --duplicates=ignore, which will never reindex an existing document. If you only add documents, this avoids the overhead of checking the last modified time. It also allows you to prioritise adding completely new documents to the database over updating existing ones.
By default, omindex will remove any document in the database which has a URL that doesn't correspond to a file seen on disk - in other words, it will clear out everything that doesn't exist any more. However if you are building up an omega database with several runs of omindex, this is not appropriate (as each run would delete the data from the previous run), so you should use the --no-delete option. Note that if you choose to work like this, it is impossible to prune old documents from the database using omindex. If this is a problem for you, an alternative is to index each subsite into a different database, and merge all the databases together when searching.
--depth-limit allows you to prevent omindex from descending more than a certain number of directories. Specifying --depth-limit=0 means no limit is imposed on recursion; --depth-limit=1 means don't descend into any subdirectories of the start directory.
HTML Parsing
The document <title> tag is used as the document title, the 'description' META tag (if present) is used for the document snippet, and the 'keywords' META tag (if present) is indexed as extra document text.
The HTML parser will look for the 'robots' META tag, and won't index pages which are marked as noindex or none, for example any of the following:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"> <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> <meta name="robots" content="none">Sometimes it is useful to be able to exclude just part of a page from being indexed (for example you may not want to index navigation links, or a footer which appears on every page). To allow this, the parser also understands ht://dig-style comments to mark sections of the document to not index:
Index this bit <!--htdig_noindex-->but <b>not</b> this<!--/htdig_noindex-->Boolean terms
omindex will create the following boolean terms when it indexes a document:
- T
- MIME type
- H
- hostname of site (if supplied - this term won't exist if you index a site with base URL '/press', for instance)
- P
- path of site (i.e. the rest of the site base URL)
- U
- full URL of indexed document - if the resulting term would be > 240 characters, a hashing scheme is used to prevent omindex overflowing the Xapian term length limit.
- D
- date (numeric format: YYYYMMDD) date can also have the magical form "latest" - a document indexed by the term Dlatest matches any date-range without an end date. You can index dynamic documents which are always up to date with Dlatest and they'll match as expected. (If you use sort by date, you'll probably also want to set the value containing the timestamp to a "max" value so dynamic documents match a date in the far future).
- M
- month (numeric format: YYYYMM)
- Y
- year (four digits)
omega configuration
Most of the omega CGI configuration is dynamic, by setting CGI parameters. However some things must be configured using a configuration file. The configuration file is searched for in various locations:
- Firstly, if the "OMEGA_CONFIG_FILE" environment variable is set, its value is used as the full path to a configuration file to read.
- Next (if the environment variable is not set, or the file pointed to is not present), the file "omega.conf" in the same directory as the Omega CGI is used.
- Next (if neither of the previous steps found a file), the file "${sysconfdir}/omega.conf" (e.g. /etc/omega.conf on Linux systems) is used.
- Finally, if no configuration file is found, default values are used.
The format of the file is very simple: a line per option, with the option name followed by its value, separated by a whitespace. Blank lines are ignored. If the first non-whitespace character on a line is a '#', omega treats the line as a comment and ignores it.
The current options are 'database_dir' (the directory containing all the Omega databases), 'template_dir' (the directory containing the OmegaScript templates), and 'log_dir' (the directory which the OmegaScript $log command writes log files to).
The default values (used if no configuration file is found) are:
database_dir /var/lib/omega/data template_dir /var/lib/omega/templates log_dir /var/log/omegaNote that, with apache, environment variables may be set using mod_env, and with apache 1.3.7 or later this may be used inside a .htaccess file. This makes it reasonably easy to share a single system installed copy of Omega between multiple users.
Supplied Templates
The OmegaScript templates supplied with Omega are:
- query - This is the default template, providing a typical Web search interface.
- topterms - This is just like query, but provides a "top terms" feature which suggests terms the user might want to add to their query to obtain better results.
- godmode - Allows you to inspect a database showing which terms index each document, and which documents are indexed by each term.
- opensearch - Provides results in OpenSearch format (for more details see http://www.opensearch.org/).
- xml - Provides results in a custom XML format.
- emptydocs - Shows a list of documents with zero length. If CGI parameter TERM is set to a non-empty value, then only documents indexed by that given term are shown (e.g. TERM=Tapplication/pdf to show PDF files with no text); otherwise all zero length documents are shown.
There are also "helper fragments" used by the templates above:
- inc/anyalldropbox - Provides a choice of matching "any" or "all" terms by default as a drop down box.
- inc/anyallradio - Provides a choice of matching "any" or "all" terms by default as radio buttons.
- toptermsjs - Provides some JavaScript used by the topterms template.
Document data construction
This is only useful if you need to inject your own documents into the database independently of omindex, such as if you are indexing dynamically-generated documents that are served using a server-side system such as PHP or ASP, but which you can determine the contents of in some way, such as documents generated from reasonably static database contents.
The document data field stores some summary information about the document, in the following (sample) format:
url=<baseurl> sample=<sample> caption=<title> type=<mimetype>Further fields may be added (although omindex doesn't currently add any others), and may be looked up from OmegaScript using the $field{} command.
As of Omega 0.9.3, you can alternatively add something like this near the start of your OmegaScript template:
$set{fieldnames,$split{caption sample url}}Then you need only give the field values in the document data, which can save a lot of space in a large database. With the setting of fieldnames above, the first line of document data can be accessed with $field{caption}, the second with $field{sample}, and the third with $field{url}.
Consider, for a moment, a small country which ventured out from a place rather distant from the rest of the world but which proceeded to create the most powerful economic and military empire the world had ever seen.
It gave the world a common language, a common currency, the rule of law, the freedom of citizenship, tariff-free trade and peace. But after that amazing achievement, in the space of just three or four generations, it was all over.
I speak, of course, of Rome. Rome didn't fall apart because the Huns came out of the Ardennes Forest or the Scots came over Hadrian's Wall. Rome fell apart in Rome. It became complacent, lazy, and indolent. Its citizens stopped caring for each other. It became a society for the selfish. Its people concentrated on their rights, not their responsibilities. As it unknowingly approached its own demise, it lacked leadership and blamed everyone but itself.
I don't want that to happen to my country. I have always believed in socially inclusive wealth creation; skilling a dynamic and confident workforce and letting them enjoy the rewards of ability and sheer hard work. Over the past decade or so, I've seen at first hand how political dogmatism, the making of policy in ignorance of real life, and an inability to harness the good of business can lead to the disintegration of a cohesive society.
We are the sixth biggest manufacturing country on earth. As you read this, there's probably an Airbus flying from Santiago in Chile to Sao Paulo in Brazil or from Chicago to San Francisco. Approximately half of each of those planes is built in Britain. The wings are built in Broughton in North Wales. The undercarriages made in Gloucester. Many of the avionics are made by small businesses in the North and Midlands. Under the wings are the best engines you will find anywhere in the world, made by Rolls-Royce in Derby.
Our country has declined to such a state that is in serious need of fixing, but we do have the framework on which to base our fightback.
The most productive car plant in the whole of Europe, the second most productive in the world, is Nissan's plant in Sunderland. Where is the only other place in Europe where Toyota is building its hybrid car? Burnaston in Derbyshire. Not France nor Germany – but in Britain.
The UK is home to some 70pc of the Formula One motor racing teams, the second most watched sport on earth. They are not here for the fun of it but for the high-class engineering skills they find in Britain – even Michael Schumacher's Mercedes is built in Northampton.
We are a globally preferred place for food manufacture and export. The second biggest pharmaceutical company in the world, GlaxoSmithKline, is based in West London. Our creative industries generate thousands of millions of pounds in web design, textile design, books, film, art, theatre, architecture, advertising, consultant engineering.
A British consulting engineer delivered the Bird's Nest stadium at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and the Watercube. A British architect designed the spectacular suspension bridge across the Tarn River Gorge in France.
Of the top 10 universities in the world, four are English – Cambridge, Oxford, University College and Imperial College, London.
If you look at the top 100 universities in the world, the only country with more than us is America. Our higher education system is first class – a status achieved almost in spite of, rather than because of, ourselves.
We don't celebrate what we're good at. We merely look inward and criticise all the time. We have ceased to believe that we do all this.
In the UK, business gets on the agenda merely through gloom or facile entertainment. Fifty redundancies at a manufacturer makes the headlines, not the fact that Jaguar has had one of its most successful quarters.
At the height of the recession it was so difficult, almost impossible, to get the nation's own broadcaster, the BBC, to cover the many good news business stories. The self-belief of the nation was debilitated again and again by the accurate but unbalanced constant drip, drip of bad news. Indeed, many small businesses told me that their only two good weeks in 2008 were those when Obama's election and swine flu took the recession off the top slot on the Ten O'Clock News.
Government intrusion has complicated running a business, teaching a class, employing more people, taking a risk and simply doing a job. Incompetence in government delivery has left us all poorer. And there's been a poverty of straightforward and honest planning for the good of UK Plc. It has been easier for government to fashion its own layers of bureaucracy, to intervene and appear to be doing something than to take the more difficult route to plain, simple and effective solutions. Much of this is because few of our politicians have had any experience of real life, or a real job.
But I believe we can fix this country – economically, yes – but, far more importantly, make it a greater place for families who are trying to bring up their children into society, helping them get good jobs, and lead fulfilling lives, and in so doing, help our country achieve 21st century success.
At the root of it all is the desperate state of our education system. We have a generation who are not equipped for the world of work. Employers complain that, even after A-level studies, many school leavers have basic problems with literacy and numeracy and seem to think that the world owes them a living.
Whatever you think of her, Margaret Thatcher set about changing the face of UK Plc – and she did just that. As a young lawyer in Birmingham in the 1980s I saw the improvement in efficiency and productivity in the West Midlands. The change was painful, certainly, but it forged companies which were fit to compete with the growing industrial strength of Asia.
Westminster's ball and chain Gordon Brown and I were meeting at his request inside Number 10 on one of the last days of June 2007, 24 hours after Brown had become Prime Minister. I was pursuing what I hoped would be a profitable, plural career, a year after leaving the CBI.
He was very businesslike as usual, but his renewed sense of purpose, of reforming zeal, of freshness, was palpable. He explained how he wanted to get some experienced non-politicians into government where their specific skills could be brought to bear for a limited period to the benefit of the country.
He then started to talk to me about the promotion of overseas trade and inward investment. He said that I'd been complaining for years that politicians had never given it the true clout that it deserved and that governments had never addressed it properly.
He was right – it had regularly enraged me that, when I was at the CBI, we'd been setting out on a trade mission and then the minister had to cancel because there was a vote in the House of Commons or some other matter deemed of greater importance in the bubble that is Westminster. So a crucial trade deal, which could have created jobs in Britain, was often hampered because a minister had to vote for something like the fox-hunting bill; or our goodwill in an important overseas market was diminished by the fear a junior minister had of falling out of favour with 'the centre'.
Now, I'd had my problems with Brown in the past, but I'll give him credit for the next bit. He said he wanted 'to change forever the way the government did trade and investment'.
The Prime Minister looked at me and said: 'So here's your chance. Let's reform the way we do it. Let's change what we do.'
He said he was going to try a big experiment to bring established experts into four areas at ministerial level. I would be Minister of State for Trade and Investment. My job was to go abroad as a Minister of the Crown and sell Brand Britain, stimulating trade and attracting inward investment.
This was precisely the change that was needed, but I could sense the trouble brewing. I'd become what Whitehall would begin to call, with its habitual wish for acronyms, a GOAT – a member of a Government Of All the Talents.
They were all mystified when after a few weeks [of taking the job] they saw a piece of paper on the front of my desk which had the following written on it . . . 'oooosssshhhhwwwrrrcccchhh'.
They asked what it was. I said it was the most common sound (through clenched teeth and pursed lips) that I heard when I wanted to do something differently. That sound would, invariably, be followed by 'I wouldn't do that, Minister', or 'very brave, Minister' – the entire place was risk averse, so that the most common advice all too readily accepted by career politicians not wanting to blot their ministerial-progress copybook was to do nothing. And I never managed to change that.
But what I hadn't expected was the omnipotent suffocation by process and the obligatory emasculation of original thought and initiative. The governmental machine demanded complete obedience in a way which anyone outside the Westminster bubble wouldn't have believed, and it distanced the parties and politicians from the real world and the real voters.
I also wondered whether the voters would expect the United Kingdom Trade Minister's official car to be made in Japan. I had been assigned a Honda hybrid not made at the Honda plant in Swindon in the UK. I told my bureaucrats that since we were all paid by the taxpayer, many of whom worked in Britain's automotive sector, then we should at least be driving a product they made.
I asked for a 2-litre diesel Jaguar X-type, similar price, the lowest of the range, made by the good men and women of Liverpool. The answer was 'no'. The Jaguar was 'not on the list'. Evidently it wasn't as 'green' as the hybrids.
I reasoned to my auto minder that I thought it was important to support the companies that invest in our country by driving in a product made by the people of this country. Pressure should be put on the makers of those cars to make them more green, rather than simply shunning them – and I added that since I was about to do a lot of miles around the country, a 2-litre diesel on the motorway would be more efficient and a lot less polluting than a hybrid. Round London a hybrid is powered by electricity, but on the motorway, its fuel consumption and emissions are not competitive.
I made it clear that, instead of the Jaguar, I would happily have a Honda (or Toyota or Nissan for that matter) made in the UK, thus rewarding the faith these world-class Japanese companies have shown in our country over the past three decades. Still the answer was no and I was told that if I wished to press the case any more, it would have to be an issue for the Prime Minister.
So there we were, about to bother the leader of the fifth biggest economy on earth with the issue of what sort of twenty five grand car a junior minister could have. I knew, sadly, the bureaucrat was serious.
We have plenty of friends in the world but I came to understand that there is one country that really doesn't like us . . . it's us! Our most effective enemy is ourselves; we tie our hands behind our backs and then enter the fight!
I found a deep respect for Britain in the countries with which we need to partner, and from whom we need inward investment, but Whitehall still regards business with disdain.
Our own Government, whether elected politicians or their enforcers, the civil service, must not suffocate our lifeline into the 21st century – the businesses of Britain and their natural ability to create wealth, taxation and jobs.
Fixing Britain: The Business of Reshaping Our Nation by Digby Jones is published by Capstone Publishing. To order a copy for £16.99 plus £1.25pp call Telegraph Books Direct on 0844-871 1515 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
© Digby Jones 2011
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